Squash the pumpkin ales

Few people buy pumpkin beer more than once a year.

That’s what brewers and beer marketing experts have told me, anyway. If true, it would mean that the brewery that floods shelves with the first pumpkin beer of the season gains a huge marketing advantage, and that the brewer who decides, in the wholesome spirit of the fall season, to wait to roll out its pumpkin brew on Halloween or Thanksgiving might sell only a fraction of the batch.

The race to be the first with a pumpkin beer is what drove brewers to release these beers earlier and earlier each fall, until a few years ago, as pumpkin beers crested the wave of mainstream popularity, we began to see them in August. This marketing strategy is called “seasonal creep,” and we see it with just about all holiday-related products.

When it comes to pumpkin beers, I’m all for seasonal creep, since it means maybe they’ll be gone by Thanksgiving.

Did I say that? I don’t dislike pumpkin beers. I just don’t see the point, because few actually taste like pumpkin. That’s because many brewers who make them tend to go heavy on additions like allspice, nutmeg, clove and cinnamon. In effect, many pumpkin beers taste like pumpkin pie—but not pumpkin.

Larry Berlin, brewer at State Room Brewery in San Rafael, says he once worked with a brewery that made an autumn pumpkin beer—and it was sort of a mockery of the concept.

“It was just a brown malty ale with a bunch of pie spices dumped in and with no pumpkin at all,” he says.

Berlin, for one, will not be making pumpkin beer this year.

But the acclaimed Magnolia Brewing Co. in San Francisco already has. In September, the landmark brewpub made a handful of interesting pumpkin beers, including a hazy blood orange pumpkin IPA cheekily named Trendy Trainwreck; Brother Gourdo, a light Belgian table ale with pumpkin, coriander and orange peel; and Insult to Injury, a sour pumpkin peach ale.

But don’t go looking for pumpkin beer at Iron Springs Pub & Brewery in Fairfax.

“Iron Springs is a pumpkin-beer-free zone,” says owner Mike Altman, who thinks the seasonal deluge of pumpkin products—especially pumpkin beers and pumpkin lattes—“sickened a lot of people of pumpkin beers.”

Now, he says, “pumpkins should be saved for baking, not brewing, but that’s just my opinion.”

Berlin thinks using pumpkins for brewing is actually a fine idea—as long as the pumpkin itself contributes in a meaningful way to the brew.

In making beer, starch is converted via enzymes into sugar, at which point yeast can ferment the sugar into alcohol. The starch generally comes from barley and wheat.

“But there are lots of alternate forms of starches to use in brewing,” Berlin says, including pumpkins.

He added that, years ago, he pondered making a sweet potato porter.

“But I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, so it never did it,” he says.

I love pumpkins—especially the great kitchen varieties like kabocha, red kuri, delicata, jarrahdale and buttercup, among others. Baked and served with melted butter and salt, these squashes are some of the finest things to eat.

But I don’t necessarily need to drink my pumpkins, especially when most of the beers made with them are distinguished by the spices and not the squash.